Bilateral shift operator 2026-10-03
The bilateral shift is unitary. It has empty point spectrum, while its approximate point spectrum is the unit circle. For , normalized vectors with entries on an interval of length fail to satisfy only at the two endpoints, giving residual norm .
For ,
The map defined by satisfies , so is a surjective isometry and hence a unitary operator.
If , then
For , this gives for every integer . When the positive tail is not square summable, when the negative tail is not square summable, and when neither tail is square summable unless . The case also forces every coordinate to vanish. Thus
The reverse triangle inequality gives, for every ,
Hence is bounded below whenever , so such do not belong to the approximate point spectrum.
Now let and define the unit vector
The equation fails only at the two endpoints, so
Therefore the bilateral shift operator has